The primacy of social over visual perspective-taking

Abstract

In this article, we argue for the developmental primacy of social over visual perspective-taking. In our terminology, social perspective-taking involves some understanding of another person's preferences, goals, intentions etc. which can be discerned from temporally extended interactions, including dialog. As is evidenced by their successful performance on various reference disambiguation tasks, infants in their second year of life first begin to develop such skills. They can, for example, determine which of two or more objects another is referring to based on previously expressed preferences or the distinct quality with which these objects were jointly explored. The pattern of findings from developmental research further indicates that this ability emerges sooner than analogous forms of visual perspective-taking. Our explanatory account of this developmental sequence highlights the primary importance of joint attention and the formation of common ground with others. Before children can develop an awareness of what exactly is seen or how an object appears from a particular viewpoint, they must learn to share attention and build common “experiential” ground. Learning about others' as well as one's own “snapshot” perspectives in a literal, i.e., optical sense of the term, is a secondary step that affords an abstraction from all (prior) pragmatic involvement with objects.

Contrasting self-report and consensus ratings of intellectual humility and arrogance

“…However, these impressions provide only a general sense of how IH manifests in behavior. A more fine-grained analysis or coding of interpersonal interactions and communication within groups, such as perspective taking (Epley, Keysar, Van Boven, & Gilovich, 2004;Moll & Kadipasaoglu, 2013), speech convergence (Pickering & Garrod, 2004), and behavioral synchrony (Lakin, 2013), may reveal the more subtle interpersonal information that reflects a focus on and openness to others' ideas. Secondly, researchers should propose and test the features of social situations expected to elicit and reveal IH to observers.…”

When do Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Take Common Ground into Account During Communication?

“…Proportion usage of complex referring term with Knowledgeable and Naïve listener of verbal reference by children with ASD. This is important because a deficit in common ground understanding might not necessarily lead to impairments in audience design, if the speaker and listener's perspectives merely differ visually (Santiesteban et al, 2015;Moll & Kadipasaoglu, 2013). Therefore, we used collaborative tasks that manipulated the social common ground shared with an interlocutor.…”

Children's (and Adults') Production Adjustments to Generic and Particular Listener Needs

“…For instance, studies with very young children typically do not require children to track another person's visual perspective in real time but rather to remember their "prior engagement" with this person (i.e., whether the person was present or absent when relevant information was presented). This type of shared knowledge with a partner seems to be available earlier and be cognitively less demanding for children (e.g., see Perner & Roessler, 2012;Moll, Richter, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2008, for relevant evidence with infants) than the ability to understand how others might perceive things visually (see Moll & Kadipasaoglu, 2013). This latter ability has been argued to develop between the ages of 4 and 5 (Moll, Meltzoff, Merzsch, & Tomasello, 2013).…”